Nobody at the FBI Was Fooled by Clinton Campaign’s Private Operatives

The FBI logo outside the headquarters building in Washington on July 5, 2016. (Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images)

Commentary

More than a year ago, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe made a stunning series of declassifications—the full implication of which many in the legacy media either ignored or never fully grasped.

I believe this was due to mainstream media being handcuffed by many of the false narratives they had been peddling to the American public for a number of years about the Spygate scandal.

One of the explosive declassifications involved handwritten notes by then-CIA Director John Brennan, who had personally briefed then-President Barack Obama and several members of his National Security Council at the White House about intercepted Russian intelligence analysis.

The content of that intercepted analysis claimed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to smear the Trump campaign with a fake Russian collusion hoax that would be created by private operatives. (My earlier column about this can be found here.)

The Brennan notes, coupled with an investigative referral sent to the FBI, make clear that all the top Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials involved in accepting fake evidence from private operatives during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign knew they were being approached by people associated with the Clinton campaign.

These federal officials then started investigations of the Trump campaign and applied for federal surveillance warrants on Trump associates based on this fake information.

The documentary evidence speaks very loudly and very clearly: None of these people at the federal agencies were fooled by either the fake Steele dossier or the fake Alfa-Bank documents.

Not one of them.

James Comey, Peter Strzok, and Andrew McCabe, to just name three of the top people involved, knew all along who these operatives approaching them with these fake hoaxes were really working for.

They had been alerted in July 2016 about what Clinton’s campaign was preparing to do. And then both Comey and Strzok were alerted again in September of 2016 when they received the investigative referral from the CIA.

Yet despite this, Comey and Strzok went ahead and took the Steele dossier from the Clinton campaign’s operatives and made use of it for a federal surveillance warrant in late October of 2016.

Despite detailed rules and regulations mandating that all material facts in such a warrant be verified and that the documented evidence of that verification is placed in what’s called the Woods File, no effort appears to have been made to authenticate the key allegations used in the warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

In fact, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz extensively documented in a December 2019 report how the FBI didn’t even interview the man Steele named to the agency as his primary subsource until January 2017, when the warrant was up for the first of what turned out to be three renewals.

That’s always been the major scandal here, as far as the FBI is concerned. That somehow every single rule, regulation, and procedure about opening an investigation, filing a surveillance warrant, and then getting it renewed was deliberately subverted and bypassed.

In September 2020, when Comey was directly asked about that September 2016 investigative referral from the CIA alerting him to the fact the Clinton campaign planned to launch a series of fake Russia hoaxes targeting Trump and his campaign associates, Comey played dumb, insisting the memo didn’t ring any bells.

Of course, Comey can’t admit that almost two months before the Crossfire Hurricane team filed its FISA surveillance warrant with the court, both he and Strzok had been asked by the intelligence agencies to conduct an investigation on a rumored dirty tricks operation making use of private firms.

While the recent leaks to the mainstream news media by the targets of the John Durham special counsel’s probe show that he’s presently focused on gathering more documentation about the crimes related to the Alfa-Bank hoax, the bank was always a minor act in the massive Spygate scandal.

The real heart of the scandal has always been the creation of the Steele dossier, the FBI accepting it—while knowing it was a hoax—and then FBI officials using the dossier as a pretext to spy on the Trump campaign.

As I have been saying for several years, Page was far from the only person who had his civil rights violated by this surveillance warrant that was granted on the basis of fraud. That warrant on Page gave the FBI a window into spying on an as of yet undetermined number of people in the Trump campaign, and the transition team following Trump’s election victory.

Since the warrant was renewed three times and was only allowed to expire in September of 2017, the spying continued into most of the Trump administration’s first year in office—a relevant fact that very few people in the mainstream news media want to dwell on.

How many people ultimately ended up being surveilled based on that illegitimate warrant? I’ve been researching Spygate for five years now, and I can’t tell you that yet. The Durham special counsel’s office likely could come up with a good estimate, but they’re not talking yet.

What we do know is that all these officials at the FBI who were involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation have a lot to answer for.

One thing is for sure, I don’t think any subsequent developments in the Durham investigation are going to be boring.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.